In 1985, John Fogerty, the singer and songwriter behind Creedence Clearwater Revival, was sued by his own former record label for plagiarism. The song he was accused of stealing had been written by exactly one person: John Fogerty.
The roots of the dispute stretched back to Creedence’s breakup in 1972, after which Fogerty remained locked into an punishing contract with Fantasy Records, run by Saul Zaentz, that he felt had been deeply unfair from the start. Fogerty has said he and his bandmates signed the deal as young, inexperienced musicians who trusted Zaentz, only to discover later that the contract stripped them of ownership over both their recordings and their publishing rights. After Creedence dissolved, Fogerty remained contractually obligated to deliver several more albums to Fantasy, a situation he has described as feeling trapped, leading him to effectively stop releasing new solo music for years out of sheer frustration.
When Fogerty finally returned in 1985 with his hit solo album “Centerfield,” he included two songs many listeners immediately recognized as thinly veiled jabs at Zaentz: “Mr. Greed” and “Zanz Kant Danz,” the latter depicting a money-stealing pig character in its lyrics and accompanying claymation music video. Zaentz responded with a $144 million defamation lawsuit, which Fogerty ultimately settled out of court after retitling the track “Vanz Kant Danz” in later pressings.
That alone might have been the end of it, but Zaentz filed an entirely separate lawsuit shortly afterward, this time accusing Fogerty of copyright infringement. The claim centered on “The Old Man Down the Road,” another track from “Centerfield,” which Zaentz alleged was musically identical to the old Creedence song “Run Through the Jungle,” a song Fogerty himself had written more than a decade earlier but no longer owned the rights to because of his old Fantasy contract.
The case went to trial in 1988, putting Fogerty in the bizarre position of effectively having to prove in court that he hadn’t plagiarized himself. During the proceedings, Fogerty brought his guitar directly into the courtroom and played excerpts of both songs live for the judge and jury, demonstrating that what they shared was simply his own long-standing musical style rather than evidence of deliberate copying. The jury ruled decisively in his favor.
Fogerty later wrote that the entire ordeal left him so rattled that it took him years to write anything resembling swamp rock again, worried he might end up back in court. He eventually fought a separate, multi-year legal battle to recover his own attorney’s fees from the case, a fight that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, which ruled in his favor and established an important legal precedent protecting other artists from similarly punishing copyright suits in the future. Fogerty later reflected that the strangest part of the entire saga wasn’t even facing his old label in court, but discovering that one of his own former Creedence bandmates had been the one to first point out the similarity between the two songs to Zaentz, a betrayal he said took him years to fully process emotionally.